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Who Sent in the Clowns?
How do the manifestly unfit become leaders?
When I was a small boy — a very small boy — I came to awareness of international relations a bit more quickly than many kids, particularly kids growing up in the Muscogee Creek Nation. In those days, they were just “the Creeks” and I did not yet understand the significance of “Muscogee” except I was confused by the slightly different spelling of the city that would in a few years get a lot of attention from country music fans when Merle Haggard dubbed himself an “Okie from Muskogee.”
In the world to which I was born, people were conscious of being a product of international relations. Specifically, the treachery and duplicity of the United States of America had shaped our reality. After allotment destroyed the Cherokee Nation economy again, my Cherokee grandfather had left the Cherokee Nation to seek work where the work was at the time as the oil boom rippled across Oklahoma.
I understand now that taking a major chill from the weather can leave you weaker and therefore more vulnerable to an infection, but going out during inclement weather does not directly “cause” pneumonia. At the time, I absorbed the family folklore that Haney Teehee went out in bad weather and came back ill. My experience had already demonstrated doctors were only for “rich people,” as I thought of ordinary…
